I have some experience being, “the huge tangled ball of yarn where every claim you dig into seems to uncover even more bizarre claims.”
My experience is that you (the digger, not leogao in particular) are making invalid assumptions, usually crude heuristics/intuitions, I point out those invalid assumptions with very precise language, and you completely ignore the precision and come up with a crude heuristic for what I said.
For example, a recent conversation I had on LessWrong:
(you) a big issue with Risk as an analogue to grand strategy is that it presumes that war is correct and zero-sum (rather than negative sum in reality).
(me) War is not zero sum in Risk. There are six players so a large conflict between two of them is usually negative sum. Also, war is usually positive sum in reality and Risk, e.g. evolution, proxy wars.
(you) all competitive board games are zero sum by default and I can’t imagine under what model wars are positive sum in reality
The first comment has two crude intuitions:
Winning in board games is zero sum → interactions in board games are zero sum
The most prominent wars in my mind are negative sum → war is negative sum
I immediately point out how these heuristics are not true:
Zero sum games with more than two players can contain subgames that are nonzero sum.
Evolution is akin to a war, and positive sum for the competitors. Proxy wars can be positive sum for the greater powers.
My best guess is they smoothed out my two claims to:
zero sum games are not always zero sum
wars, which we all know are negative sum, are positive sum
Then they walk away thinking, “man, I tried to dig into their confused epistemology, but it’s such a tangled ball of yarn that every time I follow a thread it just reveals even more bizarre claims. Like come on, he’s saying some obviously tautologically false things.”
My best guess for the miscommunication is I learned to read/write (long form) from math/coding, and pretty much no one else did. So if I say something in a very particular, precise manner, they—unlike me—never learned to pay attention to the precision. The issue is not my sending channel capacity, but their receiving, and when a packet gets dropped they do not slow down and reread. No, they conclude that the bizarre object they reconstruct must be what was originally transmitted.
I think this also mostly explains your explanations: People who don’t converge repeatedly (and from your perspective obstinately) say you are simplifying things in ways that actually matter. And, they usually have to be smart enough, or you would reconstruct their model relatively easily and not have to carefully think through what they say, the implications of what they say, and the implications of what they didn’t say (e.g. can you immediately think of a strong counterargument? then they probably did too, thought a little more, and realized it wasn’t a strong counterargument so they didn’t bother to address it).
It’s mostly an issue of, “how much effort is communication for each party?”
If you are writing an article that will be read by thousands of people, it makes sense to spend several hours to save each of them a couple minutes.
If you are teaching students who are new to the subject, and presumably have difficulty communicating where their confusion is, it makes sense to spend a lot of effort modelling them and their understanding, so your lecture builds intuitively on top of that instead of them having to contort their brains until it clicks.
If you are writing a comment that only a couple other people will ever read, and you don’t expect it to be controversial or difficult to understand, stream-of-thought writing is probably fine.
If you are debating someone on the internet, both of you are acting in good faith, and both of you are about as smart, you should write like the other person will spend the effort to understand, and read like the other person is as smart and acting in good faith as you assume they are. Doing anything different is acting in bad faith. Either you are treating them like they are stupid or they are neglecting to put in the same amount of effort as you. Now I understand there is not the intention of acting in bad faith, and in fact acting like people are lazier or stupider than they actually are may lead to better communication as a general rule of thumb, but anytime you change norms so unintentional bad faith gets rewarded, people start committing a worse sin: they act in bad faith and don’t even know why that was wrong!
I have some experience being, “the huge tangled ball of yarn where every claim you dig into seems to uncover even more bizarre claims.”
My experience is that you (the digger, not leogao in particular) are making invalid assumptions, usually crude heuristics/intuitions, I point out those invalid assumptions with very precise language, and you completely ignore the precision and come up with a crude heuristic for what I said.
For example, a recent conversation I had on LessWrong:
The first comment has two crude intuitions:
Winning in board games is zero sum → interactions in board games are zero sum
The most prominent wars in my mind are negative sum → war is negative sum
I immediately point out how these heuristics are not true:
Zero sum games with more than two players can contain subgames that are nonzero sum.
Evolution is akin to a war, and positive sum for the competitors. Proxy wars can be positive sum for the greater powers.
My best guess is they smoothed out my two claims to:
zero sum games are not always zero sum
wars, which we all know are negative sum, are positive sum
Then they walk away thinking, “man, I tried to dig into their confused epistemology, but it’s such a tangled ball of yarn that every time I follow a thread it just reveals even more bizarre claims. Like come on, he’s saying some obviously tautologically false things.”
My best guess for the miscommunication is I learned to read/write (long form) from math/coding, and pretty much no one else did. So if I say something in a very particular, precise manner, they—unlike me—never learned to pay attention to the precision. The issue is not my sending channel capacity, but their receiving, and when a packet gets dropped they do not slow down and reread. No, they conclude that the bizarre object they reconstruct must be what was originally transmitted.
I think this also mostly explains your explanations: People who don’t converge repeatedly (and from your perspective obstinately) say you are simplifying things in ways that actually matter. And, they usually have to be smart enough, or you would reconstruct their model relatively easily and not have to carefully think through what they say, the implications of what they say, and the implications of what they didn’t say (e.g. can you immediately think of a strong counterargument? then they probably did too, thought a little more, and realized it wasn’t a strong counterargument so they didn’t bother to address it).
I have similar experience except I blame myself for being bad at communicating instead of the reader lol. The customer is always right etc etc.
It’s mostly an issue of, “how much effort is communication for each party?”
If you are writing an article that will be read by thousands of people, it makes sense to spend several hours to save each of them a couple minutes.
If you are teaching students who are new to the subject, and presumably have difficulty communicating where their confusion is, it makes sense to spend a lot of effort modelling them and their understanding, so your lecture builds intuitively on top of that instead of them having to contort their brains until it clicks.
If you are writing a comment that only a couple other people will ever read, and you don’t expect it to be controversial or difficult to understand, stream-of-thought writing is probably fine.
If you are debating someone on the internet, both of you are acting in good faith, and both of you are about as smart, you should write like the other person will spend the effort to understand, and read like the other person is as smart and acting in good faith as you assume they are. Doing anything different is acting in bad faith. Either you are treating them like they are stupid or they are neglecting to put in the same amount of effort as you. Now I understand there is not the intention of acting in bad faith, and in fact acting like people are lazier or stupider than they actually are may lead to better communication as a general rule of thumb, but anytime you change norms so unintentional bad faith gets rewarded, people start committing a worse sin: they act in bad faith and don’t even know why that was wrong!